waysider

In my opinion, this would fit well in the Staged Presentations thread, as well.

I'm not trying to silence anyone. John is perfectly free to disagree with anything said here and openly express his disagreement. All I'm asking is that he adhere to the rules and try to give a logical explanation for his position, rather than constantly trying to usurp threads that are critical of The Way and its derivatives. He could have put the thread right back on track by answering the question I asked him. Can we return to topic now?

And so it circles back to perception...The mystique of holding your very own, hardbound copies of something so special.

Shouldn't one assume that any edited and published work would follow some sort of ordered sequence? It's like saying a carpenter was good at his craft because he managed to put nails in the boards.

"BTW, I'm not changing the subject. I'm contrasting and comparing." It's not clear to me what you are contrasting and comparing. Would you care to elaborate?

John, with all due respect, what is the purpose of trying to compare two entirely different things? Your experience at a splinter fellowship has nothing to do with the subject as it was presented. If you don't agree with the original premise, that's fine. You're free to say so. But please stop trying to negate the experiences of other posters.

You can post all you want, as evidenced by the fact that...well...you just did. Try, though, to stay on topic and follow the rules. As to me being intolerant, you're certainly free to have that opinion. Back to topic You indicate that TWI was intolerant of you when you disagreed with them. ("You're just as intolerant of being disagreed with as twi ever was.") How did you feel when you realized you could only stay in their graces if you agreed with them?

I don't think you'll be sent to doctrinal for calling them a couple of heartless blowhards.

The books started out as little pamphlets that later became the chapters of the books. My best guess is that Wierwille put them into book form to give the class an appearance of legitimacy, to create a perception.

Are we discussing the drug culture or The Way International? The original intent of this discussion is not only to illustrate how Way events were often staged but to explore personal reactions to realizing you were an unwitting participant to the staging. In other words, how did you feel when you discovered or suspected you were being used to further a scam and that you were behaving in a manner that wasn't representative of the real you?

You invited my response by comparing yelling (a subset of staged performances, the subject being discussed) to athletes in the spirit. I didn't discuss it, I asked if you needed further elaboration, in which case we could have moved the athletes in the spirit topic to its appropriate forum. No additional meta discussion is needed at this point.

We have a doctrinal forum for discussing such matters.

If I perceive a rock to be a jelly doughnut, it doesn't change the rock one little bit. The only thing that changes is my perception of it. Perception is everything.

Staged. And they KNEW it. With us, though, (rank and file) it's only in retrospect that we begin to comprehend how widespread the staging was.

How about when we sang "I Love You, Love You, Love You" to every guest who passed through our portals. We didn't know them from Adam but we were sure we loved them. edit: spelling

It's a matter of opinion. At least it wasn't plagiarized.

Your professor might have fared a little better if he had done a bit of etymological research before passing this off as "history".. HERE BTW. Why is it weird that he was German? According to the U.S. Census, Germans and German Americans make up the largest ancestry group in The United States.

Yeah, I see where you are going. You're saying we were athletes and thereby should have profited from yelling. There are several problems with that. The first, and not the least of which, is that the whole "athletes" metaphor being substituted for the warfare metaphor is not scripturally sound. Secondly, you are drawing a comparison between modern day sports culture and whatever it was they were doing in ancient Rome. Do I need to elaborate beyond this?

You weren't alone in that respect, I can assure you. Were there ever times when you might have doubted it's veracity, if even for a brief, glancing moment?

Scripted. For sure. What I'm looking for here are those moments when you may have had a sudden realization you were part of a scripted event. Remember a movie called The Truman Show? It (The TV show within the movie) wasn't really entirely scripted but the idea is similar. Here's a brief overview: "In this movie, Truman is a man whose life is a fake one... The place he lives is in fact a big studio with hidden cameras everywhere, and all his friends and people around him, are actors who play their roles in the most popular TV-series in the world: The Truman Show. Truman thinks that he is an ordinary man with an ordinary life and has no idea about how he is exploited. Until one day... he finds out everything. Will he react?" (SOURCE) The other day, there was talk on another thread about Jesus Freaks and The Jesus Movement. I looked at a few things on YouTube that caused me to reflect on my own distant past. WARNING! If you look at any of it closely enough, it's almost certain to evoke some type of reaction.

Self delusion...yeah...I think that's it. When you act in a stage play, you practice delusion. But you're only deluding the audience, not yourself. Oh, sure, with method acting you temporarily delude yourself but, deep inside there is still some sort of line of demarcation. With self delusion, you cross that line. And sometimes when you are behaving under self delusion, you have moments of awareness, even if only briefly, that you look back across that line and wonder if you are really "you". I had one of those moments in FellowLaborers. One day I looked in the mirror and wondered how on earth I went from being a young man with a guitar, busking in a public park, to this person who had forsaken his dreams and went to live a completely different lifestyle in a far-away commune. Like looking into the mirror and seeing someone else look back at me. How did I get here? Who have I become? That's what I'm talking about.

Isn't dorkiness really an evolutionary process, moving from one phase into the next?

Aside from repeated reference to the word "perception", this has no bearing on the concept of this thread.

When you were in The Way, did you ever feel like you were a character in some sort of stage production? By that I mean, during the PFAL class (as a grad) there were specific cues you played off of to laugh or feign excitement. It was like acting in a play......"and the sign said,'millions now smoking'..... Hahahahahaha" Is this making any sense? OK, I'll try this.... Suppose I tell you a joke about a guy who walks into a bar and sees a midget on a barstool...You think it's funny...You laugh...Now I tell you the exact same joke, with the exact same delivery, 53 more times...Is it still funny? So, then, if laughter is not a required part of the script, why do you laugh?